Monday Miscellany: Holding your ratty sweater against my cheek

Notes from April 14 - 20

Apr 22, 2025

Hello! I successfully completed another trip around the sun this past week and I’m experiencing the usual melange of emotions about it: gratitude, uncertainty, pride, fear, self-consciousness, anxiety, contentment, and joy. But overall, I feel okay. I’ve been noticing more and more grey hairs lately and I welcome them as tiny badges of honor.

Phoebe and I are birthday twins! She just turned 8. What a queen.

In other news, spring is in full swing and it’s all happening: work, friend hangs, running, house projects, various political panic, and as much time as possible spent outdoors. And, of course, I’ve been finding delight in books and music and movies.

Read this week

Beautyland was one of my very favorite novels last year,1 so when I found out that Marie-Helene Bertino was releasing a collection of short stories, I requested an early copy with lightning speed.2 And as it turns out, Exit Zero is everything I hoped and more: weird, heartfelt, eclectic, sad, funny, and did I mention weird?! This collection has everything:

Someone who gets trapped inside a rerun of Cheers
A diamond dust portrait of Cher
Ex-lovers falling from the sky like rain
Lightly interconnected vignettes that somehow made me cry??
- This quote: “I am going there tonight with a handwritten letter and a heart that churns as wildly as the blood-black sea.” Marie! Helene! Stop it!
Balloons bearing messages from an unknown entity
Haunted peaches

Not to mention Bertino’s prose, which is beautiful, tender, and just odd enough to avoid saccharinity.

Some scientists believe if you place a virus into a petri dish of water then remove it, the water retains memory of the virus. This would mean that molecules can communicate with each other without being in physical contact. Other scientists contest this, consider the water memory scientists to be naive dreamers. Last night, I sat under the stars holding your ratty sweater against my cheek.

This was my third book of hers and it has officially cemented her place on my list of auto-read authors going forward. I will also be filling in my backlist gaps (Safe as Houses and Parakeet) as soon as humanly possible.

Exit Zero comes out tomorrow, April 22, from FSG Originals (paperback lovers rejoice!) and I absolutely recommend it.

If you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I may earn a small percentage commission. This is an easy way to support my work at no additional cost to you, and I appreciate it very much—thanks! ♥︎

Seen and heard this week

Speaking of heartwarming and poignant: for my birthday on Tuesday, I met some of my best friends for pizza and then we saw The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025) at our local indie. I loved this movie SO MUCH. It’s about Charles, superfan of a folk duo that broke up years ago, who wins the lottery and uses his earnings to hire both musicians, unbeknownst to each other, for a private concert on the tiny remote Welsh island where he lives. There’s deep yearning, there’s gentle acoustic music with gorgeous vocal harmony, there’s the sister from Fleabag (unrecognizable at first because she’s smiling), there’s rain on a pebble beach, there’s the bittersweet resolve to finally move forward. And there are puns! Charles is one of my favorite characters in recent memory—pure-hearted, delightfully silly, completely oblivious to social cues. I fell hard for him and for the film as a whole, and I’m already looking forward to watching it again. Please go see it if it’s showing where you are so we can discuss.

The story of New York Ninja (2021) is completely wild. It was originally shot in 1984, but the project was abandoned when the original distribution company went bankrupt and the movie was never released. A few decades later, a new studio acquired the reels, which had no sound and no accompanying script or storyboard, and a new director reconstructed the whole thing using new actors to dub over the existing footage. The result is something of a Bad Lip Reading situation: uncanny, occasionally nonsensical, and fully ridiculous. If you love a bad movie and haven’t seen this one yet, get thee to a B-squad streaming service3 posthaste.

Last night we were looking around on Netflix for something to watch with dinner and noticed that The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019) was leaving the platform soon, so that’s what we chose. It had been on my radar since it came out, but I had no clue what it was actually about and was therefore completely surprised and delighted by the experience. First of all, it’s set in North Carolina! On the outer banks, a place that I know and love. And jeez, what a sweet story: Zak, a young man with Down syndrome, escapes his nursing home hoping to become a professional wrestler, and by chance meets Tyler, a fellow runaway fleeing the mistakes of his past. The two become friends and their journey takes them places neither of them expected at the start.

Musically, I currently find myself in a nostalgic pop-punk moment. It all started when a friend shared this video clip of Green Day singing “I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda” at Coachella, and those four seconds reminded me how much I love “American Idiot,” and then before I knew it I was blasting the whole American Idiot (2004) album while I drew the water for my evening bath. Let me just say, the first few tracks are so incredibly solid: “American Idiot,” “Jesus of Suburbia,” “Holiday,” and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” What a lineup.

I stumbled on Isn’t This Supposed to be Fun? (2007) by Farewell while scrolling through my saved albums on Spotify trying to find something suitable for a morning run. This is a bit of a deep cut—Farewell was a Greensboro band that I got into through the local scene during late high school and early college. If memory serves, my friends and I befriended a guy who photographed shows in the area and he turned us on to them. My entry points to their music were “Kelley Green” and “Manila” from the Poisoning the Lark EP. Buckle up your studded belt and dig your black hair dye out of the bathroom closet for this one:

Isn’t This Supposed to be Fun? is a bit more accessible and pop-leaning than the earlier stuff, a good bet if you like bands like The Starting Line, The Early November, Something Corporate, etc. There are no skips for me, but my favorite song might be “Zelda,” because toward the end of it they play with rhythm in a way that makes my inner music dork very happy.